Adel Darwish (born 1993) is a student at the Academy of Music and Drama at the University of Gothenburg. He has previously studied at the Institute of Film and Theatre in Aleppo, Syria. In 2016 he staged Three Question Marks at Skara Skolscen, with directorial assistance from Eva Andréasson. In 2017, Adel appeared in Shanghai at The Göteborg Opera. He also appeared in the feature film Ghabe and has written and performed in a number of short films in Syria and Sweden. In 2019/2020 he starred in Mattias Andersson´s We who got to live our lives again at Backa Teater and The Royal Dramatic Theatre.

Hierarchy of Needs premiered at Backa Teater, directed by Mattias Andersson. The production as well as Darwish himself were the topics of a Swedish State Television documentary from 2020, named When the soul trembles.

Hierarchy of Needs is a play written in the midst of a brutal and chaotic time marked by war and lines drawn between people. The play is about a guy who wants to put on a play with his friends. He’s on a stage in one country and his friends are on stage in a different country, one where war rages. They’re in the same setting, “the theater,” yet in different locations. The guy tries to write the play by exploring the room and tries to contact his friends by way of a digital screen. When he does make contact with them, reality begins to disintegrate. He’s at the theater to meet an actress and tell her about the play he wants to put on, which he also wants her to take part in.

The text is immediate, poetic, and disconcerting. It swings between reality and fantasy in three different dimensions of time. What has happened, and what will happen? Who is alive, who is dead? Are the present and the past always at hand in the future? Which human needs are in fact relative, and which are universal?

Read the excerpt here.

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